solaris… wtf?!?

Oracle recently made a major announcement regarding the future of Solaris. The company has decided to extend support for Solaris 11.4 into Nov 2037, which represents an extension of three years beyond the previous end of support. This decision affects not only Solaris 11.4, but also earlier versions of the operating system, including Solaris 10 and 11.3, whose support has also been extended until Jan 2027.

This extension of the Solaris support timeline is important news for all organizations currently on Solaris and provides them with additional time to carefully plan and execute their migration strategies. Oracle’s commitment to support Solaris through 2037 demonstrates that the company is ready to support the needs of its customers and provide long-term planning certainty.

See: https://www.oracle.com/us/assets/lifetime-support-hardware-301321.pdf

Last week I installed my first ZS9. Ah, I think I’m getting old… we calculate in petabytes now 😉

Very great news in the Solaris universe; Oracle just announced a Common Build Environment (CBE) the first time for Solaris 11.4 operating system, free to use for non-productive and development environments.
Solaris 11.0 GA was released more than 10 years ago in 2011, 11.4 in August 2018, and with the switch to a continuous delivery model many new features have been added which were only available to customers with a valid support contract.
With the new CBE version everyone who is interested in Solaris can try and download it for a demo, PoC or to develop and build their own software on a „current“ version including features, updates and security patches.
Intial installation ISO images on the Oracle Solaris 11.4 downloads page are planned to be made available soon. Solaris is installed in 5 to 10 minutes on Virtual Box, perhaps there will be a ready to use image as well.
And Oracle intention is to periodically deliver CBE releases. If you are running an older Solaris 11.4 release like the GA with the default publisher repository you will be able to update using „pkg update“.
Oracle announced Solaris Support at least until 2034 some years ago. I hope that we will see a lot of CBE versions in the next 10+ years to give developers a chance and show everyone how cool, nice and easy but super mighty an UNIX can be 😉

The official blog by Darren Moffat:
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/announcing-the-first-oracle-solaris-114-cbe